Fresh Air Kid of Shalot

Return to campus.

Find it brilliantly lit, and also empty. A cold, cold set.

Lawns vast, and also contained by formal hedges. Lawns covered in snow, not snow, plastic tarps. 

In the center of everything: the sundial sleeps. 

Break into a run down the Low steps.

Break out your voice. How how how — 

*

The poem you wrote me for my nineteenth birthday. That I printed and taped to my dorm door, next to Ilya Repin’s portrait of a doleful Vsevolod Garshin.

Garshin, the face of the Russian language map of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Repin, now reclassified Ukrainian.

My room, down the hall and around the corner from yours. In the very building — on the very floor — where Federico García Lorca had lived decades prior. Poeta en Nueva York.

My birthday, the day before yours. “Our birthday,” we called it.

“A Kasian ode,” you called the poem, and in it, I was “the Lady of Shalot.”

Because you’d seen me lying on a stone bench, hair flowing, in a long blue skirt.

You knew literary references I didn’t know, and used them generously.

I had three or four of these skirts in different colors, I called them gypsy skirts, I’d bought them at street fairs. I wore them almost exclusively after seven years of ugly jeans and plain t-shirts that drowned me.  

When I washed these skirts, the colors ran.

*

The candle you asked me to watch, while you ran downstairs to move your laundry from the washer to the dryer.

“Elo hi,” the Hebrew song you sang me in the empty after-hours hallway of Hamilton because the acoustics there were the best. The same song you later sang at my wedding, from La Reine Margot, a film you played on loop while you wrote your papers. 

The sticky cafeteria table you gripped when you asked: “Do you exist, or did I dream you?”

The honeysuckle that perfumed all Charlottesville, where I visited you one summer.

How your mother called me “the fresh air kid,” because I swept the leaves out front.

How we kept the bathroom door open so we could keep talking while the other peed.

The walls in your bedroom painted tulip poplar, a kind of soft orange. 

Your ears unpierced, like mine.

The clip-on earrings you strung together out of tiny tiny beads.

I have them still. 

I wear them while I sing my heart out over the roar of the vacuum, dust in my hair, reaching for my mother’s standard of cleanliness next to godliness, and never arriving.

PHOTOS
(1) Norman Buchbinder Way - MacDougal & West 8th
(2) Outside Philosophy Hall at Columbia

NEWS

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